Postscript: Saint of Urbanity, Jane Jacobs once wrote, “Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings." Cities with good bones and the right density are centers of innovation. Jacobs privileges place over people. The diffusion of knowledge and subsequent innovation are considerably less romantic. People move and share ideas. City or suburb, old or new building, only migration matters.

Postscript: I often meander away from a post title, which isn't a problem. Just change the title to capture the emergent theme before clicking publish. I forgot to do that. No matter since this one post has two themes going on. The first part is how globalization is moving down the urban hierarchy (e.g. from San Francisco to Portland). The second part is how innovation and creativity are moving from the urban core to the suburbs, a reconfiguration of economic geography similar to that of restaurant talent moving from DC to Pittsburgh. I intend to take on that second theme more thoroughly in my next blog post using this article as the subject, "The Young, the Restless and Economic Growth: Countries with a younger population have far higher rates of entrepreneurship." The positive correlation between a younger population and more entrepreneurship makes the same mistake as those who emphasize the positive correlation between greater urban density and more innovation. Both perspectives overlook the impact of migration itself on creativity.

Postscript: The blog post should have been much better. Relating the social network geography of crime to innovation works. But I dropped the ball explaining the links. The article about crime deserves its own spotlight. More social capital begets more crime and less innovation. Less social capital begets less crime and more innovation.

To explain the unique policing challenge posed by the Tenderloin, Cherniss cites an analytical framework used by criminologists: the so-called crime triangle, which posits that crimes have three components—suspect, location, and victim. In the Tenderloin, “going after the suspects is pointless,” he says. “I need to get rid of the location to solve the problem.”

Emphasis added. That neatly sums up former NYC mayor, Rudy Giuliani's method of cleaning up the city. He got rid of the red light district Times Square, gentrifying the neighborhood for tourists. Chicago's mayor (Rahm Emanuel) is following the same script, knowing that going after the suspects is pointless. Emanuel will help other parts of his city gentrify as a solution to the crime problem.

In fact, Lodz, a former textile manufacturing center with a population of about 740,000, is just one of several Polish cities that have become service hubs for an international corporate clientele that values Poland’s well-educated and often multilingual work force.

In midsize cities like Wroclaw and Gdansk, Poles are doing back-office work not only for Indian outsourcing companies like Infosys, Wipro and Tata Consulting Services, but also for major corporations like IBM and banks including Citigroup and Bank of New York Mellon.

About 110,000 people work in what is broadly known as the business services industry in Poland. The category includes outsourcers like Infosys that take over such functions as finance or information technology for customers, as well as banks and other companies that set up in-house operations to do their own back-office work.

For me, Poland has been a bellwether for the convergence of the Innovation Economy. Dell moved operations from Limerick, Ireland to Lodz, Poland. Ireland itself is a hot spot of economic convergence. The competition for talent is fierce with more places competing for a piece of the innovation pie. The salary ask for employees in alpha global cities is too damn high.

This group of people, the tech workers who came here strictly to follow money, is a serious point of tension among San Franciscans. Pat T describes, “Now that they’re here they have all these complaints about it…Twitter just happens to be here. That’s a point of contention for a lot of people in the city because a lot of people want SF to be their idea of SF. They have this idea of San Francisco, and these new transplants aren’t coming for that same city.”

The artists are indigenous, the real San Francisco. The techies are newcomers, who don't understand the city's soul. The gentrification battle is about control of urban space, not displacement.

Despite the increases, the cost per square meter for a Berlin apartment remains about a third of wealthier cities such as Hamburg and Munich.

But like music fans who rebel when their favorite indie bands makes it big, no one seems particularly happy about the city's new wealth or its hip international profile, which old-timers blame for driving up the rents and attracting legions of American poseurs.

The ban on vacation apartment rentals is part of a growing backlash that has seen protesters attack investors at a business convention and anti-gentrification activists vandalize a newly opened hotel.

"If you look at why multinationals came to Ireland before the crisis, they came for a number of reasons," said Barry O'Leary, the Industrial Development Agency's (IDA) chief executive.

"The things that they came for were not affected when the international financial crisis hit," he told AFP.

For foreign-born software developers, there was no financial crisis in Ireland. They can pick the nicest flat in the city. Competition for local real estate is a mismatch between tradable skills and labor (usually construction) concentrated in non-tradable industries. If you want work and a place to live, then you must leave home.

1917—The Great Jazz Migration begins when noted musician Joe “King” Oliver leaves New Orleans, La., and settles in Chicago, Ill. He is soon joined by other early Jazz greats. Their presence in Chicago laid the foundation for the Southern Black music genre (with heavy sexual overtones) to become a national obsession. Actually, the “migration” may not have been quite so romantic. Instead of being forced by the closing of the New Orleans Storyville district, Jazz greats probably left New Orleans for Chicago for the same reason other Blacks left the South–failing crops forced the disappearance of jobs while Northern factories recruited Blacks for work to produce arms and other goods for World War I. Nevertheless, many historians view Oliver’s relocation to Chicago as the start of New Orleans Jazz migrating to the rest of the nation.

I've read many people framing the Great Migration as forces of politics and culture pushing African-Americans out of the South. First off, a large number of Blacks relocated within the South (rural-to-urban migration). Second, often glossed over is the importance of recruitment and publicity to paving the way for the move from rural South to urban North. A similar migration folklore is confusing the debate about gentrification.

Postscript: Aspirational migration doesn't seem to be a problem until the aspirants pine for a neighborhood where most residents are stuck. Thinking of Pittsburgh, and other legacy cities, gentrification will pit return migrants against elderly, fixed-income residents. The abandoned city made dirt cheap living possible. But those out-sized pensions demand high property taxes. The influx of city-slickers will jack up real estate values, challenging renters and home owners alike. Then there are the non-profits (e.g. hospitals and universities) buying up huge tracts of land, making residential more dear and more important for municipal revenue. Furthermore, anchor eds and meds gentrify residential neighborhoods. Meanwhile academics and activists act like something insidious is going on. Everything is gentrification and it is all bad. Left unsaid is that only Marxist revolution will fix the "problem".

Making Woodward Avenue cool — presumably more than it is already to muscle car fans and pub-crawling millennials — could revitalize Pontiac, diversify the economy into the technology sector and even reverse brain drain, a committee of the Oakland County Business Roundtable has determined.

The "Coolest Corridor" initiative, proposed by the roundtable's Economic Development Committee at the annual roundtable meeting today at the Troy Marriott, calls for convening a task force to determine how to support business growth trends and attract and retain tech companies. ...

... "Woodward Avenue does not stop at the boundary of Oakland County, providing an opportunity to connect with edgy communities within Detroit," the report states. "The Coolest Corridor initiative would promote a vibrant mix of social gathering where commerce, culture, recreation, entertainment, education and inspiration meet."

Michigan already tried the consumer city approach to urban revitalization (“Cool Cities” Initiative) under former Governor Jennifer Granholm. It didn't work because people follow jobs, not the other way around.

WHAT WE NEED:A basic studio setup with a mic, mixer, Telos unit for recording phone calls, acoustic foam for the walls and audio editing software. Those are all one-time investments. But we also need funds to pay local reporters for their stories, to pay commentators, and to pay local stations for studio time.

At the time of this posting, there are only 33 hours left in the campaign to raise $20,000 with almost $6,000 to go.

Postscript: I searched the term "legacy economy" recently. It's used in a pejorative sense, which suits me just fine. Like Pittsburgh's brain drain, the legacy economy is a good thing. The quality of regional talent production, as well as talent refinement, is a draw for business. I'm getting more confident that the Talent Economy is the heir apparent for the Innovation Economy, which is already converging.

Postscript: I wrote about the economic geography of eds and meds last March. I danced around the heart of the issue: whether or not a sector of an economy is tradable. Only recently have I come to appreciate the importance of the tradable economy for the development of cities. Urban amenities are non-tradable. You have to move to a city in order to benefit. That's the thrust of Richard Florida's model of migration. Jobs follow people. However, the tradable economy drives urban growth and prosperity. People follow jobs. The cool cities game is zero-sum, with most places losing. I'm astonished how many cities and towns pursue this strategy. Pittsburgh is eating their lunch.

Postscript: Both terms "brain drain" and "gentrification" misunderstand migration. I'm still looking for a good reason to distinguish gentrification from other forms of displacement and economic dislocation. In both cases of brain drain and gentrification, those who leave are 100% pushed out of the community. That is to say, the community could do something to make them stay. Migration isn't that clean cut. There is usually some push and some pull informing a relocation. Also in both cases, newcomers are dehumanized and ostracized. Most of the furor over gentrification seems like an excuse for xenophobia.

Postscript: Commodities boom. Commodities bust. Conventional wisdom has a boomtown playing the hand it is dealt wisely, investing the wealth into other parts of the economy. The same rationale applies to migration. How well is Portland managing its current largess of human capital? Not very well, as near as I can discern. I have similar concerns about Australia.

Postscript: Economic cycles and migration aside, I'm mainly interested in the connection between rural communities and national identity. Reading about China, I kept thinking about Mexico:

In addition to the gender of farming, the gender of out-migration from feeder states like Michoacan, Jalisco, Guanajuato, Zacatecas, and more indigenous Chiapas and Oaxaca, has changed radically. Once upon a time only men headed for El Norte and the potentially mortal consequences of this dangerous migration but womens’ numbers in the flow north have tripled in the last decade as neo-liberal agrarian policies imposed from Mexico City have devastated the "campo" and the bottom has fallen out of Mexican agriculture.

Under presidents Carlos Salinas and Ernesto Zedillo (1988-2000), the Constitution was mutilated to allow the privatization of communally-held land, grain distribution was handed over to transnationals like the Cargill Corporation, guaranteed prices were scrapped, and credit for poor farmers dried up. Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderon (2000-2010), presidents chosen from the right-wing PAN party, have hastened the demise of the agricultural sector.

The coffin nail was the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement. Every year since, millions of tons of cheap U.S. and Canadian corn swamp Mexico forcing small-hold campesinos and campesinas out of business. A Carnegie Endowment investigation into the impacts of NAFTA on poor Mexican farmers published on the tenth anniversary of the trade treaty calculated that 1.8 million farmers had abandoned their milpas in NAFTA’s first decade – since each farm family represents five Mexicans, the real number of expulsees comes in close to 10,000,000, at least half of them women.

Emphasis added. Growing corn is to Mexico, as rice cultivation is to Japan. NAFTA effectively destroyed the icon of the Mexican yeoman farmer. Migrants streamed from rural Mexico to urban America. Rural Mexico is dying. Which means, Mexican-ness is dying. The link between a rural landscape and the national soul appears to be a universal. Thus, urbanization is an existential threat to the state and not so surprising that many suppose the globalizing city is undermining sovereignty.

Postscript: The running theme of my last few posts concerns growth without growth as the new paradigm of economic development. The old paradigm, growth because of population growth, is unsustainable. I'm looking at you, Portland, Oregon.

Postscript: While I intended to shift focus from brain drain to gentrification, a spate of smart articles about general demographic issues that impact both "problems" popped up over recent days. In terms of policy, I'm reading communities coming to grips with a more nuanced understanding of demographic decline. Economic development as practiced now is not long for this earth.

Britain has a brain drain problem: it's one of the two countries whose inventors are keenest to leave home, according to a study for WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organisation.

The :"journalist" continues:

WIPO is interested because of the negative effect on emerging countries of seeing their cleverest people emigrate. Africa and the Caribbean suffer the worst, with skilled scientific and technical graduates seeking more lucrative work in more mature economies.

The international mobility of skilled workers and its economic implications have emerged as important development topics. The project on intellectual property (IP) and brain drain seeks to generate new insights into this topic by exploring the potential of patent data to cast light on a specific category of highly skilled migrants – namely inventors. In particular, by exploiting information on inventor nationality and residence in Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) applications, it maps the migration of scientists and engineers, thereby establishing a partial geography of high-skilled migration. The present document describes in detail the mobility patterns of inventors over the 1991-2010 period. The underlying analysis is entirely descriptive and, by itself, does not offer evidence on the causes and consequences of skilled migration.

Emphasis added. Upon clicking through to read the report, I expected to find brain drain hysteria. The clamor for a more effective intellectual property regime is the model for concern about brain drain. Talent is the intellectual property of businesses and places. If we do not protect this intellectual property for businesses and places, then they won't invest in talent. To WIPO's credit, it stays above the controversy. The journalist, on the other hand, is promoting a specific agenda.

Postscript: Believe or not, I'm tired of writing about Portland. But then I stumbled into that Steve Duin opinion piece comparing higher education in Oregon with that of North Carolina. It was a good opportunity to clear the air about the Portland-Pittsburgh comparison. Enough of that. Andrew Zimmerman saying nice things about Pittsburgh:

Pittsburgh: You talk about an island in the Darwinian sense. Here's a major American city stuck at the end of a series of river valleys, cut off from the rest of country. It is a Eastern European immigrant city — working class, blue collar — that has reinvented itself over the last 10-20 years with this craftsman approach to life that reminds me of cities like Austin, Portland, OR and Portland, ME. I hate to be one of those people who's like 'Pittsburgh is the next big thing,' but I get around more than most people and I'm telling you, Pittsburgh is like the next big thing. The geography lends itself, it's incredibly lush farmland, and inexpensive city with incredible history. They're renovating 100 year old railroad terminals into city markets. They had chefs who left the city because there was no scene and went to LA, they have the talent to be anywhere in America, and they have come back and can afford to open their own places and do what they want. It's very, very exciting. As a student of these things, there's just enough Fortune 500, sports teams, to feed that group. The art community and food community are kind of leading but there's money following them.

I think people who are in eastern Pennsylvania and it's like: Who can afford a $5 million house on the beach? Why not get a beautiful house on the river? I saw places that are just breathtaking. It's also got the Appalachians running through, so it's got stunning geography. The food scene is cool. Lots of good stuff going on. There are these old bars in these old 'hoods ... It's like today's special is goulash, tomorrow's is stuffed cabbage, huge portions. There's like three grandmas and a grandpa making this from scratch, the best stuffed cabbage I've ever had and I grew up on that.

Postscript: Instead of welcoming immigrants, will the next mayor of Baltimore promote a baby boom? Population growth is a policy end. That's a lousy goal. People follow jobs. Put talent to work instead of fighting brain drain.

Postscript: I keep coming down on the side of Chicago is dying. I remain unsure if this is the case. Among the most globalized US cities, Chicago is the most affordable. It's a redoubtable talent magnet that also refines human capital for bigger and better things elsewhere. The global city distinction will remain a huge legacy asset. It also boasts perhaps the greatest assortment of Rust Belt legacy assets (e.g. research universities) in the entire country. Yet no place better epitomizes "the gated city."

Postscript: Migration, domestic and international, is more the province of the best educated. Demographic decline impacts much more of the world than Japan and Germany. After decades of diverging, the Innovation Economy is converging. Concerning workforce, size doesn't matter. Productivity does.

Postscript: While I'm not fond of the Lincoln Institute report, the term "legacy city" resonates with me. I'm working with the idea of "legacy urban economy". Demographics at the center, what Akron was is what it will be.

Postscript: The subject article makes a strong case for people-follow-jobs, demonstrating a disconnect with Tony Hsieh's downtown revitalization efforts. Fair critique or not, I'm still not sure what the people-follow-jobs approach would look like. After reading this recent post from Aaron Renn, I get the same sense of helplessness that Enrico Moretti expresses in his book, "The New Geography of Jobs." What can Las Vegas do in the face of economic divergence? A new post coming soon attempting to answer that question.

Postscript: One comment, almost an aside, from Michael Storper's lecture stood out to me. The jobs-follow-people approach does have its place. Storper contends that this theory about cities is effective intra-regionally, but not inter-regionally. That's how I see place-making and place-branding working, changing the psychology of residents and helping with community integration.

Postscript: Italy suffers from too much social capital. Mr. Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam, would say that it is a good thing. It isn't. Most Italian communities lack the capacity to embrace newcomers and thus engage in knowledge transfer. Italy lacks churn, domestic and international. An allegory:

Peter’s café sits on a hillside in Horta, a port city on one of the Azores islands in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. By the time you reach the docks in the harbour, you can tell that this place is special. Bright, colorful paintings of sailboats and flags line the piers—hundreds and hundreds of them, drawn by visiting captains and crew members from every corner of the globe. Horta is the one place between the Americas and Europe where world-traveling sailors stop to take a break. Some are heading toward Fiji, others to Spain. Some are on their second tour around the world; others are simply resting before the last leg to Brazil. They come from different backgrounds and cultures. And all of them converge upon the rustic-looking Peter’s Café. Here they can pick up year-old letters from other world travelers or just sit and talk over a beer or a glass of Madeira.

When I saw this place for the first time, I realized that the serene environment of the café actually concealed a chaotic universe. The café was filled with ideas and viewpoints from all corners of the world, and these ideas were intermingling and colliding with each other.

“Get this, they don’t use hooks when fishing for marlin in Cuba,” one visitor says.

“So what do they use?” another asks.

“Rags. The lure is covered in rags. When the fish strikes the rag, it wraps around the fish bill and won’t let go because of the friction. The fish don’t get hurt and can be released, no problem.”

“That’s pretty neat. Maybe we could use something like that. . . .”

The people here participate in what seems like an almost random combination of ideas. One conversation leads into another, and it is difficult to guess what idea will come up next. Peter’s Café is a nexus point in the world, one of the most extreme I have ever seen.

Brain drain is good for innovation. Not enough young talent is leaving Italy.

Postscript: In terms of talent migration, the primary concern for dying/failing cities is transitioning from brain to gentrification. Hypothetically, let's concede civic efforts to stop brain drain have worked. The flow reversal should boost demand for real estate, amenities, and infrastructure. But instead of staying in the suburbs where they grew up, your college graduates settle in urban neighborhoods. Those neighborhoods, while struggling with decades of sprawl, still have residents who are accustomed to the cheap rents resulting from the city exodus. Suburban-produced affluence collides with the isolation of urban blight. How does a community reconcile this tension? Is gentrification all that it is purported to be? I intend to dig into these questions as I have with brain drain.

Postscript: I'm in the process of shifting blog focus from brain drain to gentrification. The two issues occupy the same space in a community's psyche. Locals good. Outsiders bad. However, brain drain is descriptive. Gentrification is predictive. I want to try my hand at being more predictive given my understanding of brain drain.

Postscript: Okay, I started this blog thinking brain drain was a bad thing. Turns out, it is a good thing. Next up, the pejorative "Rust Belt" becomes a point of pride. "Hell with the lid taken off" doesn't mean what most people think it means. Sprawl and shrinking cities are more a function of upward mobility than White Flight. Technological advances that flooded the world with cheap food emptied out rural communities. The success of the Manufacturing Economy led to its own demise. "Bad" metrics stem from positive outcomes.

They decided that Buffalo’s civic apogee was 1901. Its industry was diverse. It received much of the Midwest’s grain in its port, milled it, and transshipped it by rail for export. Pittsburgh’s best year was 1910; Rochester’s, 1928; Philadelphia’s, 1929; Detroit’s, 1950; and Gary’s, 1953.

Mind you, that's not a population peak. The tell-tale demographic decline comes after the economic decline. For example, Pittsburgh's epic exodus during the 1980s is roughly 75 years after its civic apogee. That's a long time to go without demanding labor from outside the region.

People have been afraid of the dark since the dawn of time – and it’s a good instinct to have when you’re part of the food chain. For millions of years, light = safer. So no one complains about light that exposes potential predators.

While the film suggested a connection, ”there is no real, demonstrable correlation between lighting and crime,” Wren said. “(Rather) people feel less afraid of crime in well-lit areas.”

People feel that greater density and diversity fuel innovation. Bring on the innovation district boondoggles.

The new generation of migrant workers, by contrast, hardly worked on the farm, if ever at all, and often never saw their parents doing field labor either. Recent studies from Chinese think tanks have shown that these new migrants are less motivated by simple financial opportunities than by their own career advancement and individual interests. Moreover, they tend to put a premium on social justice and fair treatment. These lifestyle considerations make living closer to home, family, friends, and a familiar dialect and culture (which range as much in China as do the modern-day variations of Latin spoken in different corners of Europe) as important as their salary, if not more so in some cases.

Every region in the United States is in the talent attraction and retention game. However, the strategies and tactics employed are divorced from actual studies of migration patterns. What do Millennials want? I sat across from a Columbus, Ohio real estate developer at the International Economic Development Council conference in Philadelphia. The roundtable discussion was titled, "They're Just Not That into You (But They Could Be): Attracting and Retaining Young Professionals." About half of the people there for the chat fit into that category and the real estate developer was keen to know what they wanted. What I heard is that cool amenities didn't matter. Big fish, small pond did. They wanted to make a difference. They would migrate in search of that opportunity. But that qualitative data doesn't fit into a real estate developer's model. Such is the current state of regional talent management in the United States.

Postscript: To put a fine point on the post, I disagree with the analysis that migration patterns indicate economic divergence. I see economic convergence. Talent can have all of New York City in Philadelphia. Go ahead and move back to Des Moines, Iowa instead of sticking it out in sinking Chicago.

Postscript: Occasionally, I come across a legitimate brain drain problem. This story about two expatriate Nobel Prize winners isn't one of them. The Associated Press doesn't bother trying to balance its reporting, buying the hysteria without so much a second thought. Such junk journalism keeps the brain drain myth going.

The hegemony of Tokyo, London and New York—and advanced economies as a whole—will wane. The MGI expects an additional 7,000 large companies by 2025—and most of the newcomers will be based in developing countries.

The number of headquarters in São Paulo is expected to triple by 2025. Beijing and Istanbul will have twice as many large companies. In 12 years’ time 46% of large companies will be headquartered in emerging markets. About 300 cities could host large companies for the first time by 2025—and more than 150 of these cities will be in the China region. In Western Europe, there will be just three newcomers.

Globalization is on the march, in developing countries and to the forgotten parts of the United States.